


Microexpressions

by wilddragonflying



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Discussion of Canon Events, Gen, Pre-Slash, even though the author has not played this game, how was I supposed to NOT write something, listen they gave us ‘shoot him he’s the imposter’
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 23:36:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18398657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilddragonflying/pseuds/wilddragonflying
Summary: If Connor ate, he’d be picking at his food.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just kinda picking away at this, dunno how often it’ll update/how far I’ll end up taking it!

If Connor ate, he’d be picking at his food.

But, androids don’t eat, so he’s not - he’s just… staring at the table, his LED swirling yellow. Processing.

_Thinking._

Hank waits him out; the spaghetti microwave dinner he’d heated up isn’t the healthiest thing, but Connor hadn’t even mentioned it, which is how Hank knows he’s really bothered by whatever he’s tossing around that sardine can of a head of his.

Eventually, the LED pulses red briefly - the sight still makes Hank tense, even two weeks after the protests - before rotating back down to a steady blue. His expression is determined, but there’s something softer around the edges of his eyes, the set of his mouth, that reads as ‘confusion’ to Hank. “You were able to figure out which of the androids was me, in the storage facility,” he starts with.

Well, that came a bit out of left field. Hank swallows his mouthful, washes it down with some of the water that Connor _had_ insisted on. “I was,” he says - because it’s the truth, isn’t it? Why bother lying to an android who isn’t afraid to call him out on it.

“You asked us questions,” Connor says, and Hank’s still confused.

“Yeah, I was there, I nearly shot you, what’s with the play-by-play?” Hank grunts, turning his attention back to his food.

“The RK900 had my memories,” Connor says. “He knew the answers that I did. I answered your last question first, but he was already preparing to answer as well.”

“I - Jesus, kid,” Hank sighs, fork _clunk-_ ing against the tabletop. “I wasn’t looking for the verbal answer.”

Connor’s head tilts, and Hank really wishes he hadn’t just thought of how much that makes him look like Sumo did as a puppy. “Then what answer were you looking for?”

“Your reaction,” Hank says, resigned to the fact that this is a conversation that they’re going to have. “I was looking for your reaction, Connor.” Connor’s expression twists into a confused frown, and Hank gestures to his face. “Like that. You’ve always been expressive, even before you turned deviant. The RK900 was too perfect. He fooled me at first, I was - Christ, I was worried about you after the Jericho explosion. But I spent the ride to CyberLife studying him, and he was too still.”

The LED starts flickering yellow again, and Connor’s eyes go distant, like he does when he’s reconstructing a crime scene. Probably going over his memories of that encounter, trying to see what Hank saw. Eventually, his frown deepens, and he focuses back in on Hank. “I do not understand what you mean,” he says slowly. “I do not remember being expressive.”

“You were,” Hank says - sighs, really. “I’m a fucking detective, kid. Even drowning in the bottom of a bottle I still saw the clues I was trained to look for, and I saw enough in you to know you were a damned special android, even before you went and became fully sentient on me.”

“Did I not give expressions to the other questions?” Connor asks, head tilting again. There’s a curious tightness around his eyes, almost as though he’s keeping himself from scanning Hank.

“You both did, but I wasn’t… I didn’t think of the right question to ask until that one. Sumo is a dog, and you made no secret of how much you liked him before then,” Hank says, struggling to find the words to explain. “But Cole… I figured that wasn’t something you’d have been open about, even in your own mind.”

“You risked your life, my life, and the lives of everyone in the revolution on whether you could read expressions I did not even know I produced,” Connor says, still studying Hank, who fidgets uneasily.

“Yeah. We were partners for a couple days, but… Hell, kid, I invited you to stay with me,” he says, snorting. “I think that shows I paid enough attention to you to like you.”

“I saved your life multiple times,” Connor points out, matter-of-fact except for the fact that there’s a waver to his voice, an uncertainty. “You could simply have been repaying the favor.”

“Maybe,” Hank allows. “But I wasn’t.” He really hopes Connor doesn’t keep pushing, because he doesn’t want to admit he spent more time than was probably necessary studying Connor’s face for purely selfish reasons. “You changed my mind about androids, Connor. More than that, you earned my trust. Just… Leave it at that, alright?”

Connor nods, just the once, slowly - but it’s not a nod of agreement, because his LED is spinning again, yellow. _Processing._ Sometimes it feels like cheating, Hank thinks, to have this window into Connor’s head. “What expression did I give?” Connor asks after a moment, looking at Hank curiously. “That made you believe I was the one you knew.”

Hank blows out a sharp breath, wishes he had a beer to fiddle with, a label to pick at, instead of the smooth, unmarked glass that he settles for. “You didn’t… Your face kind of… twisted,” he says slowly, trying to figure out how to explain the minute expression Hank had seen that day, the one that told him more than Connor’s very presence at CyberLife that he’d gone deviant. “It wasn’t pity. It was… sorrow. Sympathy. Regret, maybe, hell I don’t really know how to describe it. But I saw it on your face before you said his name, and after, and his… He still didn’t give anything away.” Hank considers for a moment, then adds, “It was… a bit like the expression you made looking at the first android we brought in, when you found out he’d self-destructed.”

Connor hums then, an organic noise for all that it’s a synthetic voicebox it comes out of. “I see,” he says, and maybe he does, because the LED settles into blue once again, pulsing gently. “A risk, but a calculated one on your part.”

“That’s all being human is,” Hank grunts, picking at his food. “We take risks we think will pay off, and hope we didn’t make the wrong choice, because we don’t get second chances.”

“An interesting philosophy.”


	2. Keystone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Connor... being ‘human,’ being alive... It’s so difficult.

Connor spends the rest of the evening and the night that follows mulling over Hank’s explanation of how he’d known which Connor to shoot in CyberLife’s storage facility. He’d not been lying, despite the slightly-elevated heart rate; Connor attributes that, combined with his other vital signs, to stress or perhaps anxiety brought on by Connor’s question.

And yet… Connor flips through his memories of the investigation, of the time he’d spent with Hank, once again, the yellow of his LED illuminating the living room in a soft glow. He focuses on matching the signature of the expression he’d made during the questioning when Hank had a gun pointed at him, looking for other instances of the same or similar signatures in his facial manipulators. He finds some, boosting the likelihood that Hank had been truthful even further, but none that seem as significant as Hank had made them out to be.

More than a few, Hank hadn’t been able to witness, Connor finds. Either he was not present, or there had been no reflective surfaces for him to see Connor’s expression in.

The possibility that perhaps he is _missing_ some, that perhaps he might have been programmed to be expressive, that that might be something that was with him as part of his source code, not a result of his deviancy…

It unsettles him, Connor decides. Amanda had admitted he was designed to be unique, be what CyberLife needed him to be, up to and including an assassin. Could he have been _designed_ to be deviant?

He doesn’t realize he’s drumming his fingers across his thigh until he stops. It distracts him for a moment, blinking and frowning as he tries to figure out when he had started - and from _where_ he had picked up the habit. No answer comes to him, and Connor finds himself more unsettled than before.

Being sentient, being as _human_ as an android could be, was very unnerving, Connor thinks. Very complicated, and yet… He concentrates on himself  for a moment, runs a quick scan, and decides that he feels no regret for his actions in the revolution, except that he had not shut down the garden when Kamski had first told him how to.

His thoughts turn back to Hank, and he wonders if the lieutenant had any regrets. Most likely, he decides, remembering his first visit to this place, breaking a window, finding Hank unconscious, waking him and depositing him in the shower to sober him up. He knows alcohol has been a problem for Hank for years, since -

Since Cole.

And there is the source of his musings once again. Connor had not known Cole, but he knew Hank. He knew the effect that Cole’s death had had upon Hank, and he knew that Hank had regrets about Cole. He knew all of this before becoming deviant, but how had Hank known what he would look like, what he would express without words, when Hank asked what his son’s name was?

Hank said he had been expressive before, and that might be true - but Connor had been designed to integrate with humans, he had been _designed_ to be expressive.

It might be an intuition thing, he supposes, watching the clock’s seconds hand tick idly. One of those human things that defy logic, their brains picking up on patterns they don’t recognize and telling them what to do. But Connor’s ‘brain’ was oh so much more advanced than the human brain, and even it could not pick up on many instances of Connor’s face making an expression - of expressing an _emotion_ without his permission, without his design.

Perhaps Hank had also picked up on something in his voice? Cole assessed his memories once more, finding more instances of expression in the vocal files than in the musculature.

 _A combination of the two,_ Connor thinks to himself after a moment. The answer makes more sense, but it still doesn’t sit quite right with Connor. Hank had said himself that humans gamble with every decision they make - and Connor knows that humans don’t have the advantage of being able to calculate the odds of a successful or desired outcome themselves most times. They have to guess.

But Hank hadn’t guessed, Connor knew that much for sure. He had _known_ which Connor was the real one - or rather, the one that he knew and trusted.

“Trust,” Connor murmurs, startling himself with the sound of his voice in the quiet of the night. “Maybe that’s it.” Maybe it all came down to trust, in the end. Hank had said that he liked Connor, knew him, and had demonstrated that he trusted Connor. Maybe that afforded Hank insights that Connor did not know about, could not comprehend - and perhaps, insights that Hank himself could not explain.

Connor still feels as though he’s missing something. Some vital clue that would make the puzzle pieces in his mind align and snap into place, let him see the big picture in full, not simply fragmented.

 _Keystone_  flashes across his vision, an idea and a suggestion, and after a moment, he shrinks it, pins it to a corner of his vision and proceeds to spend the rest of the night mulling over how to accomplish this new objective he’s assigned himself.

He needs to find the keystone to Hank’s understanding of him. Perhaps then, he’ll be able to understand Hank as well.


End file.
